August. A lot has happened since then. Not really life-changing, I’ve just been busy with work, and life in general. I’m still working, but I have stopped riding. Back in October my derailleur on my mountain bike broke. It now only shifts between 1-7 and clicks like crazy. If I had a bike stand I could probably fix it, but I don’t want to. I got this bike just to get around when my car got repossessed a few years back. I plan to buy a Trek in the near future and get back out there. The problem now is last time I rode it was kind of warm, October, and now it’s crazy cold in the mornings. It’s not my favorite weather, but I want to get in shape and that means committing to riding in most conditions. Maybe snow days I’ll take off.
In later news, we’re suing our former landlord. We left the place looking nice and in good condition. We had plenty of issues there we didn’t create, but left it looking nice. We asked for the security back sending the letter after we moved, certified and regular mail, it got signed for, and nothing came. We paid rent on time every month for 5 1/2 years, even during the rent moratorium during the pandemic to the tune of almost $115,000. Our security was $1700, but even though she’s the one that didn’t renew our lease, she felt entitled to it. So we’re suing. Wouldn’t you know it, she counter-sues claiming $5,000 in damages when we moved out. So now she’s going to look like a bully in court when she can’t prove any such claim. People suck.
Last year I got a parking ticket. It was a stupid ticket that on the face of it was my fault, but in 10 years working in Stamford I’ve never seen anyone else get this ticket. I had an delivery from McDonald’s, and there was no parking, even in the lot down the street, so I parked on the curb and put my blinkers on. I was in and out in 5 minutes, parked where everyone parks who picks up there. And I got a ticket. $50 for that. It’s Stamford, people have more money there, so they charge more.
So I appealed it. It took about 6 months to get a hearing. I went to the hearing, presented my case (I aid my car overheated and I was getting water to fix the engine) and they said it was fine. I thought that was the end of it. Today I get a letter saying my appeal was denied. I’m curious if they denied everyone who went. Other people had pictures, and witnesses, and documents, and I was like: wow, these people are lucky that they have all of this for their hearing. But maybe they got denied, too.
So today I called, a little annoyed, because cops do it all the time to go get coffee, and everyone else parks there to get themselves food, and it’s hard being a delivery driver in a city. There’s often no parking pickups or drops offs. They said I could appeal it to the Superior Court. So I called them, and they said there’s no one there right now to help me with the paperwork, but it’s $90 to file. I’m not an idiot, I know how this story would end I only wanted to exercise my rights as far as I could take them without paying for them. If I had a solid legal reason, like say I got hit by someone else and my battery disconnected and I was calling for help, you can be sure I’d be paying the filing fee and going though the court.
It’s just super-annoying. Even on the street parking the meter maids hassle us. We KNOW you’re supposed to pay to park, but the whole street is empty, come on. We’re not shopping, we’re taking people who are out shopping. We need to sit somewhere while we wait. And WE are often the ones reporting crimes in progress to the police, or reporting injuries, or things like I did one night a guy passed out in the middle of a busy road. We’re not just transporting people and food, a lot of us also help other people along the way. I’ve personally reported several women getting assaulted, several people passed out in the road, multiple drunk drivers, a fire, tons of disabled vehicles with stranded people: we see it all and it’s not like we’re out here to take advantage of the rules just to make a quick buck.
And don’t forget that being a driver, any kind of professional driver is more dangerous than being a police officer. Whether it’s driving a truck, taxi, delivery, EMT/Paramedic, bus driver, etc: statistically all more dangerous than being a police officer. They should cut us some slack.
That’s not to sound ominous or anything, especially now with the virus….I just meant I migrated this site to a regular wordpress blog a few years ago. I actually forgot this was still up here, so I wanted to post again to redirect people in case they stumble upon this. The new site is www.tipthedriver.com
Anyway, I hope everyone is healthy, I hope we all keep our calm, we can get through this together, and it’ll just be one of those great stories we tell around campfires or at bars.
I’m going to do it today, i swear! I got distracted on the internet yesterday and by the time I went to do it it was after 4pm. Here in Connecticut at this time of year that’s when you’ve already lost the sun. I have plenty of lights in my garage to do this sort of thing, I have my regular lights, I have a 120 watt flood light,and i have a 500 watt flood light. In the summer time when I have my Rav4 up on ramps it helps to see when I’m working under the car. Speaking of that, here’s a tip: always put one of the wheels under the car when you’re under it working on it assuming it’s not on wheel ramps. When it’s on the ramps I make sure those are the right angle before driving up so there’s no overhang, I then put the car in park. When I drove stick shift i’d put it in first gear when I shut it off like when you park facing up a hill. Then I put the wheel chocks, and after that I use the jack stands on both sides. Just in case.
Anyway, when the sun’s going down it’s time to go out. I’m so behind on things I need to do that I tend to let stuff pile up. Right now I have a ton of bills I have to pay, so that’s my main concern. I owe everyone money. So these projects get pushed back in my mind. Right now I’m going to go get ready to go do this stuff. And then I need to wash the car and do the interior.
Okay, all showered, on my way to do the car camera and other stuff =)
I’ve been watching these car crash videos forever online thinking I should get one of those cameras, it’d be helpful in case anything ever happens. I think I’ve had it for about 6 months now. It’s sitting in the box on my computer desk. I think today might be the day I finally install it. I’ve gotten so lazy lately. I’m like two years behind in my magazines, about ten years behind in the books I’ve amassed, and projects like this just sit there forever, it seems.
The only real issue I have is I need to jump a fuse to make it work since it’ll need an always on power supply. That requires pulling out my car’s manual to figure out which fuses are hot (always on) all the time. It has to be a hot fuse or the camera will shut off when I shut the car off. It’s better to have it always on so if you’re parked somewhere and someone hits you, you have evidence of it. Or you never know, your camera could catch a crime. So, maybe in a little bit I’ll head out to the garage and do that. It’s been a while since I washed my car, I might do that, too. And if I do that I may as well clean the inside, and if I do that, I may as well put the new lights in.
I had those cool LED lights on the inside of the car that light up different colors, change with the music, etc, but they’re stuck on red now. I guess they don’t last very long. Anyway, I have a regular light strip you’d use say outside somewhere that you can control by remote, and they only go from white to a gold white color, so I thought I’ use those. They illuminate the car, allowing me to see the inside and allow the camera to not have to work as hard recording.
While Facebook doesn’t owe us anything, they do get a lot of data from us and make it virtually impossible to stop that. Like location. You can disable every location tracking setting and according to at least one article I read tonight, Facebook doesn’t care and tracks you anyway, and uses that data to target you with ads. If all this data is worth money to them, we <i>are</i> worth something to them. I had a Facebook account hacked. Their solution was to leave it active, but remove my phone number, not give me the option to add it back, leaving me with no way to verify who I am (they require a phone number for the sms codes). Filling out the locked accounts form doesn’t work, because it’s not locked. Trusted contacts won’t work, because you can’t add the phone back. Nothing works. 14 years if Facebook killed by a hacker who they give more rights to than rightful account owners. I’ve though about giving it up altogether a few times. My wife says all I do is argue with people on it, but it’s still a way to keep in touch with people you might not have otherwise, and much easier. As for sending nudes, one would think in private messages that would be okay. Hell, years ago I did that and never got banned. I got a few warnings. They’re very ambiguous about their rules. Any article that makes fun of Trump, even written by Time gets flagged as spam. I’ve had pictures flagged that weren’t nude or vulgar in any way. One guy posted a picture of an Oreo getting dunked in milk and was banned for life for posting sexually explicit material, with no way to appeal it. Like what’s that about? I saw the picture: it was an Oreo getting dunked in milk. Nothing weird about it at all, but he lost his account for life because Facebook says it’s too kinky.
What they <i>should</i> do for account holders who haven’t violated any rules is monetize support. It’d be a good revenue stream and people would happily pay $20 or more to get a resolution. Some people were smart enough to set up multiple accounts years ago “just in case”. But we shouldn’t have to resort to that just because Facebook is ambiguous, or simply doesn’t care. Hypothetically, if everyone decided they had enough and Billions voluntarily deleted their accounts, where would they be? No one young likes it to begin with. It could wind up going the way of Myspace. Why push people who want to be on it out the door?
Okay, so I’m not sure if I should really qualify it as starting any more than I would posting here that I’m going to get better at updating this blog. I’m not. Don’t believe me if I write that. My life is hectic. I’m married, for one, so half my time I’m doing stuff with my wife. I also wok crazy hours doing the Uber thing. I should probably be out right now, but I really hate being out early. I hate the sun right now. A little after 12, when it starts heading the other direction, I can deal with it. Till 5 or 6 when it seems to be right in your face driving. So, my wife went to Peru for two weeks and a few days recently. She just got back last Tuesday. So in that time I did a lot of cleaning, paid some bills, took a lot of time off for myself, and one night, I sat down and started the first chapter of my book. I get distracted really easily, so I probably wrote about 2,000 words and stopped. And, depending on the time of day, I can’t really type for some reason. Like right now. I think I’m doing about 40wpm. I just woke up an hour ago, and I’m still tired. I usually type between 100 and 150 wpm. Yeah, fast. I can actually one hand type about 40wpm. I’m doing it right now. Okay, now I’m back to two hands for not much improvement.
So my goal today is to do Door Dash and Uber. I need to do DD every so often to keep my account active. Uber I do all the time. I did some car repairs. New spark plugs, I put in new calipers in the back myself. New discs and pads all around, new tries, I put new headlights in so I could have projectors. That may have been a mistake. I don’t know. The lED headlights I have I got for free to try them out. I had been using them as fog lights. My new housing unit uses the same size for low beams so that’s where they are right now. But they’re really dim and I had to create an adapter on my own to go from 9006 make to h11 female. That was fun. I just ordered new bright LEDs. If that doesn’t work I’ll switch to HIDs again for my low beams. See? I just got distracted again. I was looking up prices, posting an add for my old headlight assemblies free, checking emails, and now I think I’m gonna go eat something 😛
I probably should have backed up the work I did the last few months. That was really brilliant of me to forget to do. I have a backup of my blog, but it’s from November, somehow. So, I’m back on Godaddy. They’re not the cheapest, they don’t have the best service, they don’t have the best features, but it’s comfortable, and their tech support is 24/7 and always fixes my issues. I like that. I just installed like 50 plugins, so I have to go through all of those at some point and make sure the settings play nice with each other, and delete the crap I don’t use. I’ve been blogging since 2009, but, quite honestly, I haven’t been paying much attention to what the plugins can do. The biggest thing that annoys me is prior to moving to 1&1,I had like 30,000 visitors a month. My page was ranked pretty high, and it wa worth some money. Switching lost me all of my traffic. Switching back lost me traffic again. So I’m staying with Godaddy. My wife thinks it’s a waste of money, but I like blogging.
So since July, I’ve been driving for Uber. I like it. I also do some of the other services like DoorDash, which I might do tonight. In the summer I was making about $50 an hour doing this. I kind of burned myself out and got lazy. I’ve mostly been doing UberEats, the food delivery side, just to avoid people. But I’m going to get back into the passenger side of it. And I’ll focus on cities closer to NYC so I get those good airport trips and Manhattan rides. Those pay $60-$100 depending on the distance and time. Plus, I get to walk around Manhattan when I go into the city. I can’t pick up there since I don’t live in NY unless I get the taxi license. That’s way too much hassle, so I’m not doing it. I went out for a few hours for lunch doing Eats, and I’ll go back out in a little bit doing more of that, then more passengers later. Right now, I think I’m going to watch a show, so I’ll ttyl. Soon, though, I promise for real this time.
Yeah, been doing that since July. I had to quit that pizza place, working 50 hours a week to make $500 is just nuts. Then you deduct gas and everything else and it’s like “what the hell am I thinking?”. Granted, if you’re at a really busy restaurant it’s not a bad gig. You can make $200 a day if you work all day. But I can make that in 4 hours now, so why work the extra 8 hours doing that nonsense?
So Thanksgiving Eve I made some mistakes. I took a few surging at 2.2 when I was in an area surging at 5.5 because I’m way too quick to hit the accept button. I need to focus more. I also need to learn to sleep more so I don’t get tired while I’m out. And I have bad habits like playing with my tablet while I’m in the car. I need to learn to drive. When I do drive it’s much easier to focus and the day goes by quick. I meet a lot of cool people doing this job. Anyway, I was really just editing some script on here, so I’ll try to remember to post tomorrow.
I quit working at the pizza place I was working t in Trumbull. Now I’m doing ridesharing. Yaaaaay! The pay is much better, but it’s really hard to be disciplined, and it’s hard dealing with drunks and ungrateful people all the time. The stupid score we have to maintain is just nuts. College students and drunks think four stars is a good rating, but what they don’t realize is four stars is low enough to get you fired. You need above a 4.6 or you get deactivated. Every time I take college students I regret it. I started out a 4.86 tonight and now I’m back to 4.83 because of asshole college students who want to feel powerful. And that power comes at the price of people’s jobs, and longer wait times for them. It’s stupid. They pay a third of what they would with a taxi and should be grateful, but are entitled assholes instead. The safest time to do the job is early in the day, like 5am-2pm. You can get all the same volume, all the same distances, with none of the shitty ratings. It’s amazing these companies don’t realize they’re penalizing drivers for making them money late at night.
I’ve looked EVERYWHERE and I can’t find a single site backup from before. Other than the one from 2017. I don’t know which is more likely, that I was just lazy and stupid about it, or misplaced it. I suppose the xml file could exist under another name, but I question what I would’ve renamed it. I checked everywhere, and I even looked at my emails. i sometimes send files to myself as a way to back them up.
Godaddy is still basically saying “Fuck You” as far as a site backup goes. They claim they only keep a backup for 30 days. I’m calling bullshit on that. I bet if it were a law enforcement issue they’d somehow “find” the backup. They’re doing it out of spite for not wanting to pay $15 a month for a non-monetized wordpress site. I should’ve stuck with these guys here or maybe even 000. It just seems really petty and spiteful.
So, in case you’re wondering: NO, I do not recommend GoDadday for hosting.
So Godaddy tells me yesterday that despite what they said in my BBB complaint that they do not actually have a site backup for me. So they lied, and all that work I failed to update is gone. I really don’t know what happened to it. I thought I made manual copies but so far all the ones I checked all seem to be missing the whole last year. Not to mention the fact that I can’t seem to get the xml file to load the right way and it looks like shit on here. I’m going to have to ask these guys how to get it to install the right way, but either way, it looks like all that work is gone. I’m beyond frustrated by it. I had dozens of posts. I am really bad at making regular posts to my site, so losing those is a huge blow to me. I keep saying I’m going to do this more, but i get distracted so easily. I ague with trolls on Facebook and Twitter, I’m looking at porn, I’m playing online games, I’m downloading tv shows: II’m doing everything but writing. The good news is I work for Uber and Lyft so I have lots of new stories to post about. But right now I need to go out and work. I do have a camera, now, too, so maybe I can post some of the videos.
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